The ADATA Ultimate SU750 1TB SSD Review: Realtek Does Storage, Part 1
by Billy Tallis on December 6, 2019 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The ADATA Ultimate SU750 actually manages to outperform one of the mainstream SATA drives on the Light test, though that's more due to the Crucial MX500 misbehaving than the SU750 being fast. When the test is run on a full drive, the SU750 drops to last place, but isn't far behind the other two entry-level SATA drives.
The average latency scores for the SU750 are fine when the Light test is run on an empty drive, and are at least better than the other entry-level drives for the full-drive test runs. The 99th percentile latency scores are similarly not too far behind mainstream SATA drives, and the full-drive latency doesn't have the QoS problems the Samsung 860 QVO experiences.
The SU750 has a bit of a problem with average read latency when the Light test is run on a full drive, but otherwise its average read and write latency scores are barely slower than typical mainstream SATA drives.
The 99th percentile read latency scores from the SU750 suffer a greater full-drive performance penalty than most other SATA drives experience, but nowhere near as bad as the 860 QVO. The SU750's 99th percentile write latency is fine for both empty and full drive test runs.
As usual, the SU750 has some of the highest energy usage scores, matched by the Samsung 860 QVO and the two NVMe drives. However, unlike the more difficult ATSB tests, the gap between the SU750 and the mainstream SATA drives is relatively small.
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Billy Tallis - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
SSDs need to keep track of what physical location each logical block address is stored at. This info changes constantly because flash memory needs wear leveling, and this info needs to be accessed for every read or write operation the host system issues. Most SSDs use a flash translation layer that deals with 4kB chunks, which means the full address mapping table requires 1GB for each 1TB of storage. Mainstream SSDs use DRAM to hold this table, because it's much faster than doing an extra flash read before each read or write operation can be completed. DRAMless SSDs can cache a small portion of that table (typically a few MBs or tens of MBs) within the controller itself or using the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature.DRAMless SSDs can work as a boot drive, but they're slower than mainstream drives that have the full 1GB per 1TB DRAM buffer.
PaulHoule - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
The block size of an SSD is usually larger than the block size presented to the OS. The SSD can only erase a large group of blocks at once, so it has a flash translation layer that needs to keep track of things like "Block X seen by the OS is really stored in Subblock Y of Physical Block Z". It has to access that data every time it reads or writes, so it helps for that data to be in DRAM.DRAM is also good for write caching; under ordinary circumstances it is a big performance win to buffer writes to RAM before you really do them so you can bundle writes so the SSD can do them efficiently.
Current DRAMless SSDs keep the lookup tables on the SSD itself, which is slower than RAM.
There is a standard for an NVMe device to steal some RAM from the host, which might be a good option. Also there is a standard for NVMe zoned namespaces which would let the host manage the drive more directly, put that together with a revolution in the OS and you could get something which is simple, high performance, and cheap, but that revolution is happening in the data center now, not at the client.
Goodspike - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
What's with these brand names?To me Adata means no data. Sandisk means without disk. These are not good names for storage devices!
Gills - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Realtek abandoned me on Windows 10 sound drivers for the many Toshiba POS terminals I'm tasked with updating from Windows XP and 7, so I'm not jumping onboard with anything they do anytime soon.supdawgwtfd - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
So going from one unsupported EOL O/S to another soon to be?That doesn't seem like good management.
Gills - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Worded that poorly, sorry - we're upgrading everything to Windows 10.FunBunny2 - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
"So going from one unsupported EOL O/S to another soon to be?That doesn't seem like good management."
spend some time as the 'IT manager' at any small business; this sort of driving the infrastructure into the ground is SoP.
PeachNCream - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link
To be completely fair to RealTek, if your company's point-of-sale hardware originally shipped with XP, writing Win10 drivers for that audio hardware was probably not high on anyone's list of priorities. For point-of-sale computers manufactured and shipped with Windows 7, that might be more of a problem given the less obsolete nature of the equipment and yes, I understand that POS systems are expected to have a long service life, but XP was first up for sale in late 2001 and extended suport ended in 2014.Billy Tallis - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link
FYI, extended support for the last POS edition of XP only ended 8 months ago.PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link
Ah thanks. I didn't realize that POS variants had a longer support lifespan.